Aid ship with more than 400 migrants rescued off Libya finally docks in Italy

Aid groups had been refused permission to dock at ports

More than 400 migrants pulled from the sea in recent days disembarked in Italy at the southern port of Taranto. AFP

More than 400 migrants rescued by aid ships have finally been allowed to dock in Italy.

Many of those onboard were suffering from hypothermia and dehydration when they were rescued by the Ocean Viking, a humanitarian ship run by SOS Mediterranee and Doctors without Borders (MSF) this week.

Aid workers took 72 hours to carry out the mission and rescued 407 people in five operations.

The migrants were finally taken to the southern port of Taranto on Wednesday.

Earlier a woman who had suffered serious burns and her three children were removed from the ship and taken to Malta.

SOS Mediteranee operations director Federic Penard said it took the ship 10 hours to reach the location of the last two rescues and that Maltese armed forces handled a third.

Mr Penard said co-ordination and rescue operations on the dangerous central Mediterranean route were chaotic and there were not enough rescue ships on the lookout for people in trouble.

‘’The main issue is how to rescue these people," he said.

The Twitter account for Alarm Phone, an emergency hotline for people crossing the Mediterranean, posted that it was alerted in the past five days of nine boats in distress, carrying about 650 people.

‘’All of them escaped war-torn Libya and reached Europe,'' the tweet said.

Mr Penard called for government-led rescue operations, such as Italy's former Mare Nostrum patrols or the EU's Operation Sofia.

Sofia stopped operating ships last March and is limited to aerial surveillance.

‘’There is complete chaos in terms of co-ordination between the maritime authorities in Europe and the maritime authorities in Libya,'' Mr Penard said.

‘’Each rescue, we feel, is a bit of a miracle that we find the boats.''

The migrants who landed in Italy included 12 pregnant women and 132 unaccompanied children as young as 12, and 20 families, government officials said.

Malta opened a port Wednesday to the Alan Kurdi, a rescue ship run by a German humanitarian group, which was carrying 77 rescued migrants.

The Maltese government said it would accept 50 of the passengers for processing of asylum claims and the others would be transferred to other European countries.